Ponder: true justice is the fruit of bounty

"A curious thing happens to the spokesman of justice in this parable.  He is accused of envy.  What a reply to one convinced that he has suffered an injustice!  Instead of hearing as he expected, that untamperable right will be restored, he must learn that his real motive for intervening was inferior!  Yet if we accept Scripture as God's holy word, we learn a strange rule about human nature: that when it becomes necessary to invoke justice, that irreproachable value and crystalline motive, almost always something is rotten in Denmark.  To often 'justice' is used as a mask for quite different things.

Human justice is highly problematical.  It is something a man should strive for but not lean upon.  Perhaps we come closest to the true sense of the New Testament if we say that genuine justice is not the beginning but the end, and the other justice so pompously displayed as the fundament of morality is a dubious thing.  True justice is the fruit of bounty, and practicable by man only after he has been initiated into the school of divine love where he has learned to see people as they really are, himself included.  Before one can be just, one must learn to love."

Romano Guardini, The Lord (1954), 261.

Ponder: the spacious dome of mercy

"Justice is good.  It is the foundation of existence.  But there is something higher than justice, the bountiful widening of the heart to mercy.  Justice is clear, but one step further and it becomes cold.  Mercy is genuine, heartfelt; when backed by character, it warms and redeems.  Justice regulates, orders existence; mercy creates.  Justice satisfies the mind that all is as it should be, but from mercy leaps the joy of creative life.  That is why it is written that heaven rejoices more over one sinner who repents than over a hundred just who have no need of it.  High above all the stupidity and evil of mankind arches the spacious dome of mercy."

Romano Guardini, The Lord (1954), 259.

Love and Reason

“And the LORD said to her, "Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples, born of you, shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.”

Genesis 25:23

What does she see in him?  Surely, like me, you’ve sat in the congregation at a wedding more than once, staring the couple before you.  It couldn’t be the looks or the brain power, to be sure.  Wouldn’t be the prospect for success or the pleasant disposition.  Surely, she could do better for herself. 

And yet those promises are made.  Such bold things they are to say to another person, who is surely to change, and not always for the better.  “Will you have this man, this woman?” Love which must choose, if it is to be love.  What does she see in him?  Isn’t it merely that she sees him, and that is enough. 

The blindness of love: it must be about the oldest of all jokes.  In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Titania awakens to fall in love with Bottom, recently turned into a donkey, he gets the best line: "And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.[1]”  Pascal may have been mulling over higher things, but he was making the same general point when he wrote: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.[2]”

Ponder: "according to his own great goodness"

“Shall I withhold a little money or food from my fellow-creature, for fear he should not be good enough to receive it of me? Do I beg of God to deal with me, not according to my merit, but according to his own great goodness; and should I be so absurd, as to with-hold my charity from a poor brother, because he may perhaps not deserve it?  Shall I use measure toward him, which I pray God never to use toward me.”

William Law, A Serious Call, qtd. in Stranks, Anglican Devotion, 185-6.

Ponder: "a feel-good distraction"

"There is no end to Harvard's offenders--or Yale's or Princeton's or, for  that matter, most American institutions with a history.  Few entities can withstand the scrutiny of the modern conscience, and physically disassembling the artifacts of the past, attacking its symbols and its ghosts is a fool's errand--no matter how lofty the cause.  It illuminates little and is a feel-good distraction that comes at the expense of today's very real crises.  And picking and choosing which ancient offenses warrant purging creates the danger of prioritizing one historically disadvantaged group over another, inadvertently importing into our own age the very toxins of bigotry that activists now seek to condemn.

We can endlessly denounce the long-departed and disavow the already discredited, but to what end?  What we should do instead is devote ourselves to living our lives in a way that allows our descendants to take pride in the history we leave behind."

Ted Gup, “Waging War on the Dead at Harvard,” The Washington Post 20 Mar. 2016, A23

Rend the Heavens: A Meditation for Advent

“O that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down.”  Is. 64:1

The Church’s faith and proclamation seldom clashes as sharply with the world as in the early days of December.  The world is well into its “holiday season,” a time of meaningless jollity, excessive consumption, and a sentimental delight in the vague pleasantries of the comfortable home and the stable family. 

But the Church is keeping Advent.  We sit with those “who dwell in deep darkness” and follow the Baptist out into the desert.  We call for the Lord to come with power and set this sad and broken world to rights.  We scan the distant mountains for the first rays of the coming dawn.

For Meditation: There and then this Lamb shall mary me

From my morning reading, John Donne's sermon preached at St. Clement Danes (May 30, 1621).  The sermon was delivered at a wedding, and in this section Donne considers the marriage between Christ and each member of His Body.  This passage imagines that, as in the Church's marriage liturgy, there might be a moment in the contracting of the spiritual bond in which others might justly object.

"This is a mariage in that great and glorious Congregation, where all my sins shall be laid open to the eye of all the world, where all the blessed Virgins shall see all my uncleannesse, and all the Martyrs see all my tergiversations, and all the Confessors see all my double dealings in Gods cause; where Abraham shall see my faithlessnesse in Gods promises; and Job my impatience in Gods corrections; and Lazarus my hardness of heart in distributing Gods blessings to the poore; and those Virgins, and Martyrs, and Confessors, and Abraham, and Job, and Lazarus, and all that Congregation, shall look upon the Lamb and upon me, and upon one another, as though they would all forbid those banes, and say to one another, Will this Lamb have any thing to doe with this soule? and yet there and then this Lamb shall mary me, and mary me In aeternum, for ever, which is our last circumstance"  (82-83).